Renovation inspires effort to capture essence of 1910 courthouse

HARRIS COUNTY HISTORY

ALLAN TURNER, Copyright 2011 Houston Chronicle |
June 22, 2011

Archivist Sarah Jackson and her colleagues conducted a seven-year series of interviews to capture the essence of the newly renovated 1910 Harris County Civil Courthouse.

More than nostalgia or a foreboding that valuable history was slipping away with each heartbeat, it was architecture — just bricks and mortar — that transformed Harris County archivist Sarah Jackson into an oral historian.

Early in the process of returning the county's old civil courthouse to its 1910 splendor — a $50 million project set for completion this summer — county leaders recognized they knew little about how the building's interior originally looked.

"We were doing background in its history to put through a grant application," Jackson said. "We had no photos."

Blueprints provided vital construction data, but on matters such as the color of the dome's skylight, they were vague or silent.

For answers, Jackson and her colleagues turned to courthouse veteran Thomas Anderson, a lawyer who happened to be a nephew of Houston business icons Will Clayton and M.D. Anderson. Born in 1912, Anderson was intimately acquainted with the building and the dramas played out within its walls.

In August 2004, he became the first in an ongoing series of interviews designed to capture not only the facts but the essence of county governance.

Since then, 11 others — tax office workers, a one-time judge, a janitor-protege of former Commissioner E.A. "Squatty" Lyons, an African-American home demonstration agent — have added their voices to the collection.

The project has grown slowly, largely through the efforts of Jackson and assistant archivist Annie Golden. Their primary duties remain the collection, organizing and preserving of thousands of county documents.

This week, Jackson put out a call for "committed" volunteers who, with training, could conduct interviews and help with transcribing. The transcripts ultimately are posted on the archive's website, www.hctx.net/archives.

"When I think of the number of oral histories we need to do and that we have not," Jackson said, "it almost makes me sick."

Though such interviews have pitfalls — participants may jazz up their stories, or simply might not remember — they offer a unique opportunity to hear history in the voices of people who lived it.

Anderson, who began practicing law in 1935, clearly recalled the old courthouse, with its granite steps facing Fannin Street. At the center of the rotunda was a massive model of a ship. He recalled the building's imposing marble stairs, as well as its elevators and their operators.

'Eureka' moments

Behind the county clerk's office, in a concrete chamber with steel doors, deputy clerks stood at desks transcribing deeds by hand.

"These men wrote wonderful hands," Anderson said. "As far as I know, they never got any words wrong, and they gabbled like geese the whole time they were writing. Perfectly amazing."

The nephew of cotton brokers Clayton and M.D. Anderson — the former would become an architect of the post-World War II Marshall Plan, while the latter would be the benefactor of the famed cancer hospital that bears his name — Anderson nonetheless began his legal career with grunt duties.

" 'Gofers,' I supposed we'd be called," Anderson said. His initial stint as a local lawyer ended with the start of World War II. He died in 2007.

The interviews are filled with "eureka" moments, times when the narratives surprisingly veer into unexpectedly rich subject matter.

A former judge, William Hatten, who died this month at 97, told interviewers of growing up in Houston's First Ward, where as a youth, he threw newspapers and delivered ice. His political campaigns involved quitting-time stops at oil refineries to press the flesh and pass out literature.

Retired home demonstration agent Vera Harris talked of her early days with the Negro Extension Service in Austin County, where she taught clients how to make mattresses. She recalled her feelings as integration at last came to her beloved 4-H clubs.

From ink pens to Internet

Sarah McLemore, a 31-year employee of the county tax office, recalled how her department was wrenched from the ink-on-paper era, when depleted fountain pens had to be turned in before another was issued, into today's world of computerized documents.

And Squatty Lyon's buddy, J.E. "Mac" McCain, told of how, as a teen in Alabama, he broke into the courthouse to alter his birth certificate — all a ploy to go to sea during World War II. He became a county janitor, then building superintendent and, Jackson said, "knew where all the skeletons were buried."

"That was the funniest story," the archivist said of McCain's courthouse break-in. "He was an incredible man."